Pay telephones are common in the prior art. With the recent advent of multimedia, it is desirable to vend multimedia services at a multimedia apparatus, much in a similar way to the way in the which public pay phone services are provided.
Public delivery of multimedia services such as electronic mail, Internet browsing and wayfinding have been attempted to date by placing a personal computer in a secure box. This approach has largely failed due to users being intimidated by personal computers, poor reliability of personal computers, the lack of useful services typically found on personal computers and the large effort required to maintain such computers.
In addition, existing multimedia services have used conventional touchscreen technology employing a display located behind a touchpad to display icons to indicate portions of the display the user is required to touch in order to effect certain functions and conventional mouse-based systems which require a user to point to a scroll button and drag the scroll button or click on it, in order to cause the display to scroll left, right, up or down. The use of a touchscreen requires the use of valuable display space to display buttons for the user to touch. In addition, the use of a pointing device may be difficult for some users. When using a touchscreen-based multimedia apparatus for browsing pages of information, slight problems with touchscreen calibration become very frustrating for users trying to use the scroll bars due to inherent, small and sensitive target points on the bar. What would be desirable, therefore, would be to provide a scrolling mechanism separate from the touchscreen and which requires little dexterity to use and which is more intuitive for new users. The use of a mechanism which provides a positive response as the user can feel the movement of the mechanism would be desirable.
In addition, when users are using a public access multimedia apparatus with a keypad, they are often unsure of when they are meant to use the keypad for input. The more peripherals the multimedia apparatus has, the more unclear it is for the user as to when they should use the keypad or other peripherals. What would be desirable therefore, would be to provide some indication to the user that a particular input device is to be actuated.
On devices which provide audio output, it is desirable to be able to adjust the volume of such audio output. Where there are a plurality of audio output devices however, in a public multimedia apparatus, it is impractical to have a plurality of volume controls for each audio output device. Therefore, what would be desirable is a single volume control which is context-sensitive, allowing volume of any audio device in the system to be adjusted by such single control.
Existing display phone technology has been used in areas such as hotels and airports, etc., with some success. To provide a display of the type used in such multimedia apparatus in a public multimedia terminal, would be impractical, as a separate vacuum florescent display would be required. It would be desirable, therefore, to emulate the vacuum florescent display found on conventional display phones and produce the displays appearing on such prior displays on a CRT display in a public multimedia apparatus capable of providing telephone and multimedia services.
With the advent of new payment methods including credit cards, debit cards and the like, it is desirable that users be able to pay for services rendered by a public multimedia apparatus using any one of the available payment options. Requesting a user to initiate payment multiple times during a session is not acceptable. It would be desirable therefore to provide a method of paying once for unlimited service usage during a session.
Generally, public multimedia terminals charge a user either a set fee or charge by the minute, irrespective of the response of the multimedia terminal as seen by the user. Delays in such responses may be due to delays in receiving data from a network and it is not acceptable to expect a user to pay for delays or resource problems experienced by the network. Rather, the user should only be charged for actual, legitimate transfers of data. The present invention addresses these and other needs.